Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The More Gender Equality, the Fewer Women in STEM (2018)

theatlantic.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

161–170 of 630 posts

Re: The More Gender Equality, the Fewer Women in STEM (2018)

#161

Post by blattimwind »

jelliclesfarm wrote: post #90
dev_by_day wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Work places discriminating based on gender would be terrible. There shouldn't be "male only" work places just like there shouldn't be "female only" work places. This would be a regression to the dark ages of grouping and separating people based on biological identity, not a good idea and honestly not helpful. There is zero evidence that shows these ideas actually make students or working environments healthier and mo…

I disagree. I think pay scale disparities would also disappear if women had gender segregated work spaces. It would be a more supportive environment and less conflict. I suspect efficiency would also improve at work places. Throw a picnic or party or twice a week meeting or something for everyone to meet up...but having equal strength and equally compensated and mirror hierarchies of gender segregated work places wou…

> pay scale disparities would also disappear if women had gender segregated work spaces.

Okay so here's the thing. Even with my typically-European limited view into the salaries of others at my work places, from what I've observed and from the statistics I have consulted the actual "pay scale disparities" between genders are tiny / non-existent if you compare the same jobs. There is a major difference in gender-split GDP (~15-25 % depending on the country), but that is mostly down to women and men having different distributions of jobs, and not down to women getting paid less for the same work. Whether, globally speaking, different job distributions are a major issue, is an open debate.

Re: The More Gender Equality, the Fewer Women in STEM (2018)

#162

Post by jelliclesfarm »

blattimwind wrote: post #153
Hitton wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>This is not just in an intellectual setting. Last week I had a voice quivering, temple throbbing, blue vein screaming episode at a guy I hired to do some work. I just lost it. >It’s a constant battle of wits dealing with men that it’s exhausting. It’s even worse than in an office environment because men think the tasks that involve physical prowess is their domain. They simply will NOT take orders from a woman. And…

> voice quivering, temple throbbing, blue vein screaming episode at a guy

Because of inappropriate touching, boundary testing conversation, bone headed adherence to defense of a lack of skill and zero inclination to accept sensible advice.

Re: The More Gender Equality, the Fewer Women in STEM (2018)

#163

Post by josephg »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #80
DuskStar wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem I always have with this argument is "Why not medicine? Why not Law?" Why is it that two professions that you'd naively expect to be just as sexist, if not far more sexist than STEM (Higher status, more of an "old boys club", established hierarchy that has positions like nurses for women, etc) have achieved gender parity, while STEM hasn't?

In case of medicine - because it's a large field full of career paths that are very different from each other. The daily realities of being a pediatrician, a surgeon, a psychiatrist or a radiologist have very little in common. There's this hypothesis that men statistically tend to pick jobs involving working with and treating patients as things, and women tend to pick jobs involving people and socializing. Medicine a…

Exactly. And once you look at the sub fields, medicine stops looking so gender equal. Most nurses are female. Most surgeons are male. Most family doctors are female, etc. In aggregate the field is about 50-50, but medicine specialties are not gender neutral at all.

Re: The More Gender Equality, the Fewer Women in STEM (2018)

#164

Post by jayd16 »

lgleason wrote: post #130

It all comes down to equality of opportunity vs equality of outcome. When there is equality of opportunity women choose different fields...often (but not always) because of different interests. Equality of outcome forces people to do things that they may not have an interest in. And that is before you get into interests vs natural talent and how that does or does not affect ones success in a field. On a fundamental l…

Implicit bias also guides interests and choice. Many women I meet today simply did not consider the possibility of an engineering career, not that they were forced out of it.

We look to outcome equality to gain some kind of insight into this.

Re: The More Gender Equality, the Fewer Women in STEM (2018)

#165

Post by jelliclesfarm »

glofish wrote: post #133
jelliclesfarm wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I did say that ‘this is a BS theory of mine’ and that I would like to know what others feel about it. It’s right at the beginning of my comment. Do you want to read it again?

very trumpian actually, similarly how he says: "some people say", "so I heard" then spews off things to argue a point and convince you. Then there is an easy escape, I "just heard that" same way, no one writes so many lines of arguments, in such detail, then say, oh it is all BS

Ok. I don’t know what you want me to say. You made queries about my comment. I attempted to answer it. How you interpret it is not my concern. But thanks for your feedback.

Re: The More Gender Equality, the Fewer Women in STEM (2018)

#166

Post by blattimwind »

cgiles wrote: post #71
wayoutthere wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So this is incredibly misguided and sexist. But I've lived as a man and a woman, I feel qualified to comment. The problem is that society holds men and women to a different standard: women are expected to be in control of their emotions / self and men are not. If a woman's emotions come out (screaming or whatever) then she's unhinged, irrational. If a man does it, he's just blowing off steam or asserting himself. Men…

> women are expected to be in control of their emotions / self and men are not > Men are not often held accountable for taking their emotions out on people, be they anxiety, depression or insecurity I think a more accurate framing is that women are not allowed to be angry or aggressive, and men are not allowed to be sad or vulnerable. In public, at least. Consider how much more tolerable, and therefore common, it is…

Angry or aggressive behaviour is not socially acceptable for men, at least where I come from. Men are mostly expected to just not exhibit emotions publicly.

Re: The More Gender Equality, the Fewer Women in STEM (2018)

#167

Post by TulliusCicero »

rayiner wrote: post #152
TulliusCicero wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The legal profession is far ahead of STEM in addressing sexism. Many law firms have adopted the Mansfield Rule But did they have this back in the 60's and 70's when representation started going up? What caused it back then, that didn't apply to engineering?

There have been decades of efforts at the various stages of the pipeline. In the 1960s and 1970s law schools started admitting gender balanced classes. In the 1970s and 1980s there was a series of lawsuits as a result of which law firms began to hire gender balanced classes of entry level lawyers. The Mansfield rule is now directed at addressing remaining disparities in the partner ranks.

> In the 1960s and 1970s law schools started admitting gender balanced classes.

Be specific, because this could mean different things. Were the genders balanced because the applicant pool itself had become balanced, or because law schools started enforcing balance in admission, or a mix of both?

> In the 1970s and 1980s there was a series of lawsuits as a result of which law firms began to hire gender balanced classes of entry level lawyers

And what were the graduate pools like at the time, re: gender balance? Do you have sources that talk about these points, because it sounds interesting.

Part of the issue for tech companies is that there are fewer women with CS degrees, something they don't directly control, and have only modest at best influence over. And then at the university level, they've had issues getting more women to sign up, though I understand some schools have had more success than others.

Re: The More Gender Equality, the Fewer Women in STEM (2018)

#168

Post by junolucina »

bluGill wrote: post #96
calibas wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are observable differences not the basis of empirical science?

Which differences. There is the genitalia that nobody argues with. Likewise testosterone differences. Pretty much everything else isn't as clear cut. We know that more men than women go into STEM - but we don't know if it is because men fundamentally like those jobs better, or if it is because our culture makes it less acceptable for women to go into STEM. Often culture things are subtle and people will say things th…

Motherhood.

Re: The More Gender Equality, the Fewer Women in STEM (2018)

#169

Post by zmmmmm »

Reedx wrote: post #108
pj_mukh wrote: post #35

Coming from one of these countries to America, the answer seems obvious. STEM jobs have a HUGE differential in stability and status in those countries, so women put up up with much more patriarchal BS at the workplace to hold on to them. My sister was a STEM worker in India. When she moved to America, she looked around to see writers with relatively safe, high-status job and switched out immediately. Yes, women in Am…

Ask women and you'll find that most aren't interested in programming a computer all day. Which one could argue is a sane choice. If anything it's more sane. Stop trying to make them feel like something is wrong if they don't have this inclination. Males and females have different preferences on average, some as early as birth[1]. This is not a bad thing. For the ones that want to program all day, obviously they shoul…

> Ask women and you'll find that most aren't interested in programming a computer all day

I think this though itself is an artefact of a male dominated profession. The fact that working with software is "programming a computer all day" reflects a male preference and value system, and many people open acknowledge that it's quite harmful and often creates quite dysfunctional teams. We need better requirements, better communication, better documentation, more human approach to the whole process. I've talked to great women working in software development who say "I don't really care about the programming itself and I would never go home and do it for fun - but I love the other aspects of the job". Perhaps the nature of the job itself needs to change a bit for the preferences to adjust.

Re: The More Gender Equality, the Fewer Women in STEM (2018)

#170

Post by chongli »

Doingmything123 wrote: post #120
zarkov99 wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here is a theory, perhaps you could comment on how if fits your experience: Women are less inclined than men to choose STEM Fields, for biological reasons, that is they tend to be more interested in people than things. Because of this STEM fields are dominated by men, who, because of sheer numbers alone, end up shaping the culture to be more masculine. This makes STEM even less appealing for the relatively rare women…

Robert Martin talks about how in the 60's and 70's women made up a large amount of the worlds programmers. It would seem somewhere along the way we found ways to significantly reduce the number of women entering the profession. I would argue that any biological reasons have little to no influence compared to social factors. If we accept this alternative theory, then the solution is to change the social culture around…

In the early days, programming was more of a secretarial position. The computer scientists and mathematicians who created the algorithms couldn’t be bothered to write the code and type everything up on the punchcard machines.

This sort of job for women is basically a continuation of the days when women were human computers, hired to do loads of calculations for mathematicians and scientists. The fact that women took these jobs has more to do with their limited opportunities elsewhere than anything else.

Post reply on HN